Bread and Better

Thursday, 11 April 2013

Banana and White Chocolate Muffins with a Caramel Icing

There were a lot of bananas in my house that needed using up, so I decided to treat my work colleagues to some banana and white chocolate muffins. The chocolate and bananas combine together to create a wonderful moist and creamy cake mixture. Whilst I call these muffins, they are probably more like cupcakes, its just that 'banana cupcakes' don't really have the same ring to them as 'banana muffins'.
I made these by combining 3 large bananas (or 4 small ones) and 100g of white chocolate chips to my usual sponge cake mix. The sponge cake recipe I tend to use (for cakes that I am going to add fruit to anyway) is a doubled up version Delia Smith's 'All In One Sponge' (which is 220g of butter, 220g of caster sugar, 220g of self raising flour, 4 eggs, 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract and 1 teaspoon of baking powder all mixed together).
I have made these muffins quite a few times, as they keep really well, and I would usually decorate them with a white chocolate buttercream. This time though, I decided to try something new and decorate them with a caramel buttercream from one of the Primrose Bakery's books.
I made the buttercream by placing butter, milk and brown sugar in a pan over a high heat and bringing to the boil for one minute. I then removed from the heat and added the icing sugar. I found that the taste of the buttercream reminded me a lot of a fudge I like to make (I suppose because most of the same ingredients are used). I found I had to beat this buttercream a lot in-between decorating the cakes as started to set quite fast. It was very tasty though and I would defiantly use it again.
Happy baking!